How to Remove Silence From mp3 Automatically.

Whether you are recording a podcast, speech, or even a lecture in an audience, you will find parts of the recording that have little or no sound. All of these parts are easy to edit and delete manually, but there are simpler and faster ways, so you don’t have to spend time choosing every part. While this is not a cheat sheet to remove silence in post-production and always leave it for editing, I suggest you always try to improve as much as possible before recording.

So let’s see how we can remove silence from mp3 automatically.

How to remove silence from an audio file

1. Audacity

It is already widely used software. It does everything from editing podcasts to recording entire albums. I use it for all sound editing and basic processing and it is perfect for all requirements. One feature that I mainly use is the Silence Removal Tool. It comes in handy in all situations, removes the main fragments of silence and saves not only time, but also storage space. Here’s how to do it on Windows with Audacity.

Parts of the silence are highlighted in the image above.

Download Audacity from the link below, install and open. You can record audio, or simply drag and drop the audio sample you want to process. You will see your sound in a waveform, and if you take a close look, there will be areas where there is no sound (i.e., a straight line). But if you play a track and notice the monitor, you will notice that it bounces even when silence is playing. So if you recorded yourself with a lot of pauses, relax, we will remove the silence in one go.

Double-click a track to start, or press Ctrl + A to select everything. Then click Effects, scroll down and find Trim Silence. If you are unsure, leave the settings unchanged and click OK. This will give you a trimmed version of the audio file after all silence has been removed.

If you want to customize the setting yourself. Here are the attributes you need to be aware of in the Trim Silence dialog box. In the Silence Detection section, you specify the threshold and duration.

Detect silence

Threshold. If the sound is below the specified level, it will be considered silence. To remove more silence, you can reduce this number, for example, from -36 dB to -20 dB. This will give the program more sound to work with.

Duration – Indicates the minimum duration during which silent parts must be considered for removal. The last value can be adjusted to 0.001 seconds.

Act

Trim, Detect Silence – the track will be truncated to the settings in the Detect Silence field. If the sound is below both the level and duration set in the Define silence field, it will take into account the number set in the Truncate to parameter.

Shrink to is a more advanced feature. If the sound is below the Detect Silence threshold and duration, but is still longer, it will be scaled down to the percentage specified in the Compress To function.

Trim tracks yourself. If there are more tracks and you apply this tool to all of them, it will not remove the silence, because it will not detect it at the same point. Thus, selecting this option will remove silence regardless of all tracks.

You can also save a preset if you want to use the same settings more often.

Get Audacity here.

2. AudioLab on Android

Another part of the application that comes in handy when processing voice is our task. The app is feature-rich and you can do a lot beyond basic editing. All options like crop, merge, transform, split, etc. are presented in tiles, so you can choose a specific function to work with.

Scroll down and find Silence Remover then select it. You can select tracks from a list of all tracks or choose a file manager to manually select it. It is also possible to record audio. In addition to this, you can preview the sound and change the filename. You can choose one of the presets to remove silence. You can remove all silence or just the beginning and end. Then you have to choose a decibel threshold below which everything will be considered silence. You can leave the detection mode as it is. It’s also possible to use the output as an alarm, notification, or even your default ringtone, but let’s skip that for now. Then hit the checkbox, which will remove the silence and create another file. You can preview the file in the output section of AudioLab and also listen to the original file.

Download AudioLab for Android.

3. A ferrite recording studio

If you are an iOS user looking for an easy way to remove silence from an audio file, this is the app you need.

First, download the application from the link below and open it. You can import audio by opening the menu in the upper right corner. If you want to record your voice, just press the microphone button. Once you import or record audio, you will find the track right below the recording section. Now let’s move on to removing the silent parts.

Just load a track and click on a track to select it. Then switch to see more options and select Strip Silence. There are options to customize which parts you want to remove. To do this, select a threshold, you can also reduce the silence and set the duration of the minimum silence. Keep in mind that this will simply remove the silence. Essentially, there are empty spaces left, so you’ll have to drag the clip to align them together. It’s simple, right?

Download Ferrite Recording Studio for iOS.

Concluding remarks

While many people often confuse removing silence with noise canceling, I’ve just listed ways to eliminate silence. Audacity is by far the simplest and most functional. It is available on all major PC platforms including Linux. When it comes to Android, which I record most of my audio on, Audiolab not only has a silence remover, but other important features like merging audio as well. voice converter, speech to text conversion and more. For those of you on iOS, Ferrite Recording Studio is a great option, and the silence remover works even with the free version of the app. I hope you give them a try and don’t waste time in silence, good luck!